The Roundup

Greetings, fellow readers! This blog doesn't have a specific theme; it's more of a general roundup of all the books I've read and the bookish things I've done lately.

I haven't actually read too many novels recently, though I did finish A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki, which was really good. I've been reading Carol Ann Duffy's The Bees, which is the first collection of poetry she's published since becoming the Poet Laureate of the UK. (Fun facts about Duffy: in my Modern British Poetry class, I learned that she is the first woman, the first Scottish person, and the first LGBTQ person to hold the title of Poet Laureate--is that cool or what?) I haven't gotten past Part One of the book yet, mostly because Duffy's language is so good I want to savor it like it's orange blossom honey. She has this fantastic rendition of Ariel's "Where the bee sucks there suck I" speech from The Tempest that I am obsessed with. Some of my other favorites are "Mrs. Schofield's GCSE" and "Scheherazade." This is definitely a collection I'll take my time with.

This past weekend, I made a trip with my friend Jordan to Wild Iris, a small feminist bookstore in downtown Gainesville. After accidentally going to their old location and stopping at the public library to ask directions (I know, how nerdy is that?!), we finally made it, I with quarter-size blisters on the balls of my feet. The bookstore was eclectic: it's run entirely by volunteers, and they host regular art shows and open mic nights. The selection was a little narrow for my taste (even though I do consider myself a feminist FOR LIFE), but it was definitely a neat little place. I did end up buying some notebooks from there (because you can never have too many notebooks.)

It seems Shakespeare in the Park is not quite finished yet: my scenemates and I are going to perform in a local European festival sometime next month. It'll be a fun way to keep the excitement going now that the mainstage production is over.

That's all I have for now! Take care, and happy reading!

Until next time,

Anna

In Lieu of Mr. Darcy

Greetings, fellow readers! I have survived the Hell Week that is Shakespeare in the Park dress rehearsals and performances. After a solid week of going straight to the park from class, then staying until after ten o'clock at night, I am ready for some sleep! Alas, my professors have other plans: I have two exams and a computer science project due this week. (We're coding Breakout this week. If you thought that game was simple, boy, are you wrong!)

Anyway, I thought I'd alleviate some of the post-Shakespeare slump by writing about (what else?) Shakespeare. Specifically, I'd like to write about my first love: the bard's own King Henry V. This was the first Shakespeare play I saw adapted for film, and my little eight grade self fell head over heels in love with the eloquent, heroic Plantagenet. He could spend the wee hours of the morning expounding on the difficulties of leading men to their deaths, fight with the best of them throughout the day, then come home at night and say those three magic words--"Kiss me, Kate"--that made my little heart swell with joy.

I know a lot of readers have their literary loves--for a great many women, that love is Jane Austen's Mr. Darcy, but I've never loved any drawing room gentleman as much as I loved the man who fought on St. Crispin's Day. There's something endearing about Prince Hal, who was both beloved and admired by his friends and respected by his enemies. No matter how many fictional worthies I encounter in the books to come, he'll always have a special place in my Shakespeare-loving heart.

Until next time,

Anna

Confessions of an Accidental Poetry Reader

Greetings, fellow readers! For those of you coming back from spring break, welcome! I hope all your vacations were restful and fun. For those of you yet to reach your reprieve, I feel your pain; hang in there! For me, it's back to the usual round of literature and computer science: I have a paper on Coleridge's "Christabel" due this Friday, and I just finished making a game of Flappy Bird for my Java class, so if you're in need of some head-banging frustration and futility that would make Sisyphus turn green with envy, hit me up!

Thankfully, spring break was a restorative time for me: some of my friends came to visit me in Jacksonville, and I went to the bookstore three times! This brings me to the theme of today's post: poetry. I've never been anti-poetry, but until coming to college, I've never been a big fan either. Sure, I could recognize quotes from Emily Dickinson or Shakespeare's sonnets, but I never considered myself a Poetry Reader. All that changed spring of my freshman year when I took a class called Modern British Poetry. That class really opened my horizons and made me realize just how diverse poetry is as a genre. We read everything from T.S. Eliot's long, abstruse poem "The Waste Land" to Stevie Smith's sassy lyrics complete with her own line drawings.  We read classic authors like Yeats and Auden, but we also studied contemporary voices like Grace Nichols and Carol Ann Duffy, the Poet Laureate of the UK. Since then, I have taken a poetry class every semester.

I didn't realize I was a Poetry Reader until this spring break, however. I went with my friends Rachel and Haley to Chamblin's Bookmine, which is a used bookstore in Jacksonville. This place is Narnia for book lovers. It's a shabby little shoebox of a building on the outside, but on the inside, it's a forest. Books shoot up to the ceiling like trees; they crouch in corners like foxes; they spring up beneath your feet like violets. You would never guess based on its unassuming interior that Chamblin's is crammed with over a million books.

I'm happy to say that quite a few of those million books now reside on my shelves in Gainesville. As soon as we got to Chamblin's, I made a beeline for the poetry section. I was looking for Szymborska's Poems New and Collected (see my previous entries for more on her), but I found infinitely more riches as well. I ended up having a bonding moment with three other students over Adrienne Rich (they recommended three of her best volumes) and Rumi. I said, "Wouldn't it be ironic if Rumi had claustrophobia?" We were cackling madly over that one!

In addition to the Szymborska and Rich, I found good translations of Sappho and Catullus (thanks to Allison, my Classicist-in-residence, for teaching me how to spot them), complete works of A.E. Houseman and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, sonnets and lyrics of Edna St. Vincent Millay, a guide to writing poetry by Mary Oliver, and for some variety, A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf. I can't believe I didn't have my own copy before!

There were many more books to be had in my successive trips, and I will write about them all as I read them, but it should suffice for now to proclaim that I, for better or for worse, am a bona fide Poetry Reader!

Until next time,

Anna

Just my Type

Greetings, fellow readers! I'm taking a break from the midterm crunch to share my one of my nerdy guilty pleasures with you: my obsession with typography. If you're the kind of person who has ever cringed over a paper typed in Comic Sans or debated the benefits of serif versus sans-serif fonts, you know exactly what I'm talking about. If not, welcome to my world!

Typography has a long and fascinating history. I've been learning a lot about it in my Internet Literature class. Perhaps the most interesting tidbit I've come across is the story of Aldus Manutius, a 15th century Italian printer and humanist whose accomplishments include inventing italic type, standardizing the modern appearance and use of commas and semicolons, and creating the first paperback books. Together with his friend Francesco Griffo, Manutius created at least five different typefaces which are still used today.

I even found this little "What typeface are you?" quiz the other day. I got Garamond, so naturally I did some digging into the history of the font. It is named after Claude Garamont, a Belgian printer who became prominent in the 1540's after the French king Francis I commissioned him to create a Greek typeface. I learned that Garamond is considered one of the most legible and eco-friendly (in terms of efficient ink usage) of all typefaces used in print applications. Also, the Hunger Games trilogy, the Dr. Seuss stories,  and the American editions of the Harry Potter series are all set in different variations of Garamond.

Dave Eggers, editor of the beloved journal McSweeney's, stated that one of his goals was to use only the font Garamond 3 in the journal "because it looked good in so many permutations—italics, small caps, all caps, tracked out, justified or not." Maybe I'll do the same and make Garamond the official font of all my writings and correspondence!

What's your type? Click on the link below to take the quiz, and let me know in the comments what you learn about your font!

http://www.buzzfeed.com/alannaokun/what-font-are-you

Until next time,

Anna

Latin, Squares, and Other Things

Greetings, fellow readers! Lemony Snicket once said, "February is the shortest month of the year, so if you are having a miserable month, try to schedule it for February." As much as I revere the esteemed Mr. Snicket, I have to disagree. February is the month of my birthday; therefore, how could it be anything but a time of joyous celebration and revelry? But that's not for another two weeks, alas.

Today is Allison's birthday instead; we celebrated with presents and pizza. We also worked on a Catullus poem Allison is translating for her Latin reading group. She did the translating, I organized the rhyme and meter. English major school is good for some things, you know!

Translating the poem was a lot of fun; it's challenging trying to figure out how to write good poetry in English while staying true to the original Latin. It's something I've always wanted to try. Who knows, maybe someday we'll give the entire Catullan corpus a shot!

Speaking of challenging, this was also a good week for the budding computer scientist in me. Inspired by a class demonstration of objects (this refers to the massive storehouses of information which make Java so powerful and efficient), I created a program to draw Albers squares. These were pioneered by Josef Albers, a designer and artist who used them to illustrate his scientific study of color.

"There is no difference between science and art when it comes to creativeness, productiveness, to come to conclusions and formulations."--Josef Albers

The gist of the program is this: computers create colors by interpreting sets of RGB values, numbers between 0 and 255. This stands for "red, green, blue" and indicates what proportion of these colors needs to mix to create a new color. For example, red is 255 0 0: all red, no green, and no blue. You can get really fancy and make colors like Orchid (218 112 214) and Spring Green (0 255 127), but in the end, it all comes down to mixing red, green, and blue.

My program allows you to input the RGB values for up to three colors--a total of nine numbers separated by spaces. Then, it draws two Albers squares using the colors you've chosen.

This was a really fun project to work on, and an important milestone for me. I'm beginning to realize how much I can do with just some basic knowledge of computer programming. Our next class project is to write a program that draws fractal art, a challenge much more complicated than simply making squares. Stay tuned for my thoughts about that one!

Today was a good day for my school reading as well. I'm writing an essay on "Night the Fourth" of The Four Zoas, a truly bizarre work by Romantic poet William Blake. I'm not the biggest fan of Blake--he's a little too obtuse and mystical for me--but he certainly does demand that you pay attention when you read his poems.

I've also been writing another blog for my Internet Literature class; it's not finished yet, but I'll post the link when I'm done. It's very different from this one, focusing instead more on art and my own aesthetic sensibility. It, too, is an interesting project to work on.

Not much reading for fun lately, though I did manage to get through The Emperor of All Maladies, which was excellent. I highly recommend it. It doesn't look like I'll have much chance to pursue reading of my own between now and spring break, but I'll keep you posted.

Until next time,

Anna

Learning to Read, Part Two

In my last post, I focused mainly on the kind of reading I do for my English classes: close readings of literary texts. However, that's not the only kind of reading I've had to do in college.

Sometimes, we're required to read in another language, one that is unfamiliar to us. In that case, we need to be particularly attentive to detail. I've learned a lot about this from my roommate, Allison, who is a Classics major. She takes several Latin translation classes each semester, and through her, I've learned a lot about what it means to read in another language. For example, there are over 42 distinct words for kill in Latin. Latin is full of elaborate grammatical constructs and metaphors, some of which we don't understand because we're not reading from the context of ancient Roman culture, Allison says. Even so, it astounds me not only that these texts have survived for so long, but also that we can understand them at all. All these stories and thoughts would be lost to us without people like Allison who have dedicated themselves to reading and understanding a language different from their own.

I have delved into learning a new language of my own this semester: the computer programming language Java. Unlike natural languages, such as English, German, and Japanese, programming languages are formal. This means that the computer relies on a strict syntactical code for reading and interpreting the programs I've written. Computers take things very literally, which means I have to be extremely careful with my syntax, which is like the grammar and punctuation of programming languages.

A human being can understand this message, even though it's not grammatically correct:

i luv 2 eat ice cream its gr8

If, however, I were to type something with similar syntactical errors into a computer program, I'd be inundated with error messages. I'd have to enter something more formal:

I love to eat ice cream. It's great.

See what I mean? Programming can be frustrating at times, but the more I practice, the more I learn how to write the way a computer thinks. It's not so different from the close reading I do for my English classes. In both cases, reading is an interpretive act. It broadens my point of view and helps me think of new ways to solve problems. Not to mention you can do some pretty awesome things with computer programs: for my class, I made a point-and-click adventure game and wrote two programs that encrypt messages using a secret code. I'm excited to see what other adventures are in store.

Learning to Read

The longer I'm in college, the more I'm convinced the ultimate aim of education is learning how to read properly. I'm not just talking about your basic literacy here; if all we needed to know was basic phonics and spelling, we'd be done with school in second or third grade. College takes reading to a whole new level and challenges you to rethink what you know about reading.

Let's start with an obvious example: my English classes. One of the biggest perks (and pitfalls) of being an English major is that I have to read--all the time. Even when the material is difficult or obscure, even when I'm tired, even when I've read the same ten lines of poetry so many times the words are starting to blur together on the page. The most important thing I've learned as an English major is how to read closely, to look past the surface of the words and try to get inside the mind of the author. Close reading allows me to analyze the author's arguments, look for flaws in the author's logic, and appreciate the author's use of language.

They say good readers make good writers, and all this close reading practice has definitely made me better at writing. I use the same techniques when I'm revising and editing my papers as I do when I'm reading for my classes on Kafka and Romantic poetry. Close reading has made me more attuned to my own use of language, and it has definitely increased the efficacy of my writing. In Six Memos for the Next Millennium, a book I'm reading for my Internet Literature class, Italo Calvino says that one of the essential qualities of good literature is exactitude. He says that writers should be precise in their use of language and grammar. Poets should choose their words with care so as to achieve maximum affect with the least amount of words.

This piece of advice reminds me of a poem by Wisława Szymborska, a Polish poet I discovered through my good friend Sasha. Szymborska's use of language is masterful, each phrase evoking a distinct mental image that stays with me long after I've closed her poetry book. I've included one of my favorite poems in this post--as an actor and Shakespearean, it resonates with me in a special way. I hope you enjoy it. 

Wisława Szymborska - Theatre Impressions (from Could Have, translated from the original Polish by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh)

For me the tragedy's most important act is the sixth:
the raising of the dead from the stage's battlegrounds
the straightening of wigs and fancy gowns
removing knives from stricken breasts,
taking nooses from lifeless necks,
lining up among the living
to face the audience.

The bows, both solo and ensemble -
the pale hand on the wounded heart,
the curtseys of the hapless suicide,
the bobbing of the chopped-off head.


The bows in pairs -
rage extends its arm to meekness,
the victim's eyes smile at the torturer,
the rebel indulgently walks besides the tyrant.

Eternity trampled by the golden slipper's toe.
Redeeming values swept aside with the swish of a wide-brimmed hat.
The unrepentant urge to start all over tomorrow.

Now enter, single file, the hosts who died early on,
in Acts 3 and 4, or between scenes.

The miraculous return of all those lost without a trace.
The thought that they've been waiting patiently offstage
without taking off their makeup
or their costumes
moves me more than all the tragedy's tirades.

But the curtain's fall is the most uplifting part,
the things you see before it hits the floor:
here one hand quickly reaches for a flower,
there another hand picks up a fallen sword.
Only then one last, unseen hand
does its duty
and grabs me by the throat.